The International Rule-Based Order is a Liberal Myth

For the past eight days liberals, neoconservatives, and globalists have been deploring the “end of the rule-based order” that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brings and that in their minds began in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, no such fiction has ever existed, including during the past 31 years during which Chavez and Maduro, the Castros, the Chinese Communist Party, the Palestinians and the Israelis, the Iraqi and Iranian governments, the North Koreans, and even the United States itself (albeit with some legal and political finagling for cover), to name just a few international miscreants), broke the “rules” whenever they chose to do so. That was inevitable, since international rules—including codified international law itself–are a fiction that chiefly serves the world’s political and commercial elites. A law that cannot, ultimately, be enforced is no law at all, as Vladimir Putin is so convincingly demonstrating today. So far as an international order based on rules had a semblance of reality, it existed only in the past three decades. Just as it could never take form before then, so it almost certainly can never do so again. The period—in relative terms an Augenblick in the historical record—was the creation of circumstances that are as anomalous as they are historically unrepeatable. With Putin’s Ukrainian invasion the world is being awakened to the plain realities of human history, in which nations and other socio-political constructs and groupings have imposed their will on other ones when they had the inclination and the power to do so, and the objects of their aggressions defended themselves by whatever means they could and however it suited them to do so. Machiavelli and Hobbes had an infinitely stronger grip, a far deeper understanding of history, than Francis Fukuyama and any modern democratic politician has.  That is not to say that Machiavellians and Hobbesians necessarily act on this understanding in a fair, moral, or humane way –of course, they don’t— simply that Christian morality and liberal principle have never directed relations between states and empires, and never will short of the Second Coming—and that will be too late.

Liberals’ fatal delusion is to suppose that the modern world between 1800 and today has been steadily approaching the norm of human existence, when in fact it is has been regressing deeper and deeper into an abnormal state. Industrialism is abnormal. So is democracy. So is the belief in social equality. So is feminism, based on the delusion that men and women are interchangeable mentally, emotionally, and physically, and so are imbecilic and irresponsible notions of children’s rights. All these things have been made possible by industrialism, which has created unnatural conditions of human existence by allowing humans to live in circumstances of unnatural comfort and ease that have corrupted them physically, morally, and socially. Industrialism, which developed symbiotically with liberalism, has provided the material excesses that made liberal illusions appear real, substantial, and realizable. When industrial civilization collapses as it must, like everything that is abnormal and unnatural, liberalism will go along with it (if it hasn’t gone already), and the world will be too hard, too basic, too real, and too human a place to support such liberal fantasies as female armies, transgenderism, and an international rules-based order. Absent industrialism, human civilization will be far less urbanized and more ruralized, bringing it to contact again with the harsh realities of nature that in turn will reacquaint it with the natural world and with nature’s God, and thus a pious fear and respect for Him and for his rules that the liberal democratic-industrial-capitalist world has turned men and women away from.

chiltonwilliamson.com/